9.
Haft, Adele J. – „Maps, Mazes, and Monsters: The Iconography of the Library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose”, Studies in Iconography 14, Arizona State University (1995), http://www.themodernword.com
/eco/eco_papers_haft.html.

„A long time ago, on the underground realm where there are no lies or pain, lived a princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, breezes and bright sun. One day, deceiving her jailers, the Princess escaped. Once she was out, the brilliance blinded her and deleted any recollection of her memory. She forgot who she was and where she was. She suffered from cold, disease and pain. Finally, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess’s soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place or at another time. And ke kept on waiting until he pulled the last breath, until the world ceased to spin.”[1] – (Guillermo del Toro/ Pan, El Laberinto del Fauno)

The introduction of the cinematographic work El Laberinto del Fauno[2] anticipates the way of the little girl Ofelia, lost from reality. The key space introduced by the director and writer Guillermo del Toro is Pan’s labyrinth, representing the point of confluence between Franco’s Spain reality in a magical originating world. Paradoxically, the anxieties of the historical period (prior to World War II[3]) determine a fracture of the story developed on two levels – on one hand the reality of the guerrillas fighting, on the other a fantastic world imagined by the children.

The two levels meet at the nodal point of the labyrinth – it offers the access to a different temporal unit, a place of initiation, discoveries, shift and return in a pure world, a world of fairy tales and of the lost time „without lies, without pain”.

The ability to introduce the entity of the labyrinth on a frequency that meets the architectural perceptions of the element is outstanding. Guillermo del Toro composes a concentric recurring system, by coupling two of the typical, referential forms of the labyrinth[4] – he creates a world built hierarchically in successive layers. At the ground level, the spatial plot develops in the garden space, reminiscent of the Romantic vegetal routes, while the underground recalls for the originating typology of the labyrinth / maze, following a planimetric circuit.

Frequently, the fairy tales include the typology of the garden by developing the model of the charmed, sacred forests, where temples or traces of a crumbling architecture, consumed by vegetation, are to be seen. Often associated with the landscape facilities in the 15-19 centuries, the labyrinth and the fountain are parts of the same metaphorical system in the cinematographic fantasies. Staking on the complexity of the constructive system – stairs, walls, poles – the labyrinth exploits the horizontal spaciousness, operating both at ground level in El Laberinto del Fauno and underground in Interview with a Vampire[5]. The typology of the fountain develops the vertical descending – ascending spindle; it speculates the purity of the form dug ad invertum and the force of the centre, becoming a symbolic depiction of the underground architecture as an access point in another world.

„The labyrinth is a very, very powerful sign,” – “It’s a primordial, almost iconic symbol. It can mean so many things, culturally, depending on where you do it. But the main thing for me is that, unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way. That was very important for me.”[6]

Peter Zumthor materializes the labyrinth in terms of sequence and of an introvert structure. The metaphor of the restoration is the basis for the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion[7] project; under the crown of the trees in Kensington Gardens in London, the Hidden Garden (Hortus conclusus) is apparently a parallelepiped, opaque, a much too short volume, metaphorically concentrating the light and the vegetation in the central atrium. In a chromatic interpretation, the Centre is positive, bright, dominant, antithetic to the building itself – a land-based enclosure, drawn by the constant gravitation, burdened by dark colours and minimal openings.

„The concept is the hortus conclusus, a contemplative room, a garden within a garden. The building acts as a stage, a backdrop for the interior garden of flowers and light. Through blackness and shadow one enters the building from the lawn and begins the transition into the central garden, a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers. This experience will be intense and memorable, as will the materials themselves – full of memory and time.”[8]

The building is a garden in the garden, a world in another world in the same manner in which Umberto Eco designed his labyrinth[9]. In the spirit of post-modernist theories (Il Nome Della Rosa), Eco supports the cycle of the fairy tales and their reporting to other stories, in whole or in part: „books always talk about other books and each story tells another story that has already been told.” He applies the same recurrence to the architectural constructions. Similarly, for Jorge Luis Borges, the universe in Library of Babel is described as a library, harbouring endless symmetrical rooms, containing the same number of books, containing the same number of symbols.[10]

In a complementary perspective, the theorist Gilles Deleuze highlights the interpretation of the successive plans: „the outside is not a fixed limit, but a moving subject animated by the peristaltic movements, folds and plies that together make up an interior: there are none other than the exterior, even the inside of the outside.” [11]

In a gesture of material compression, Peter Zumthor condensed the Kensington Gardens pavilion in the outer wall thickness; he minimizes the width of the built structure and amplifies the proportion of the garden-centre. Analog to Umberto Eco’s structures, the solution calls for the labyrinthine typology, such as: sectioned perspectives, a fragmented admission of the light, obscure chromatisms, a cyclic-concentric route, offering similar frustrating perspectives. The road / route is identified as a primary spatial factor, as the constructive elements subordinate thereto. Within the context, the walls become borders, being primarily straightforward plans.

„We begin our way with firm decision to learn and to understand everything. The endless corridors with endless niches, each of which we must observe. Next turn gives us a new perspective with new niches. And at the end of the way – the last glance at all what we have gone throwgh.”[12] ( Alexander Brodsky & Ilia Utkin )

Returning to the labyrinth in El Laberinto del Faun, we note the relevance of the road in terms of purposefulness. The garden is designed based on the labyrinth interpreted as a ritual and sacrificial space; according to its religious / astrological components[13], it focuses on the transition between the Earth and the underground world. Ofelia follows the labyrinth, volumetrically built, finds the central shaft / fountain, descends and, in the last stage of discovery, faces a planimetric „maze”[14] incised in stone.

The director speculates the significance of the descent by associating the typologies of the types underground architectures with the columbarium model and the significance of the necropolis; he reunites them stylistically. The spiritual fulfilment, the process of growing up[15], the self awareness as a result of the trials, is the key road from El Laberinto del Fauno; the abandon of the road and the impossibility to finish the maze involve loss of sensitivity, of the innocence of childhood.

„Your spirit will remain forever among people. You will grow old too, you will die too. And all the memories about you will fade in time. And we will elapse with them.” (Pan discussing with Ofelia, El Laberinto del Fauno)[16]

The monuments dedicated to Holocaust designed by Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind in Berlin: the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2003-2004 and the Garden of Exile and Emigration, Jewish Museum, 1999, talk about loss, time and spirit, in terms of the spatial labyrinth.

In the contemporary interpretation, the updating of the labyrinthine garden designs into monumental architectural spaces is done either through uniformity, as a matrix- labyrinthine structure (Daniel Libeskind), as a stroboscopic multiplication of the parallelepiped volumes – a grave stones’ carpet[17] in Eisenman’s memorial, or as a field covered by rocky fragments at Treblinka (Haupt & Dyszenko).

The „sinking” into the progressive labyrinth of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial[18] induces the spatial loss as a timeless estate. The 2,700 concrete pillars, stelae, are placed on a grid planimetry deployed on 19,000 sq m, speculating the land slope; along the dynamic roadmap, the visibility is reduced imperceptibly, one losing himself in a repetitive structure. Two artifices induce a concealed decreasing of the pedestrians’ height, namely the imperceptible slope of the land correlated with a progressive increase of the height of the volumes – a stroboscopic progression that is playing with the perception of human scale. The recall is stimulated by inducing the states of individual loss, of spatial anguish.

” You go and walk in it, and you will feel uncertain, you know? These things are tilting. I don’t know where I’m going. Am I going to get lost? I’m alone. I can’t hold anybody’s hand. And that, when they get done, was what it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the ’30s. That all. Basta. That’s the monument.”[19] ( Peter Eisenman )

Eisenman supported the idea that, by following the undulating pathway, the pedestrians may be involved in a daily experience. „Iwant it to be a part of the everyday life. People that went on around it, say it is very humble… I like to think that people will use it for short cuts, as an everyday experience, not as a holy place.„[20]

The empathy generated by the transposition of the sympathetic sensory perception was the primary cause of abstraction. Nevertheless, the abstraction was later attacked by critics for the implied degree of generalization and the lack of religious symbolism, hence the architect’s compromise and his agreement for building an underground information centre[21]: „I fought to keep names off the stones, because having names on them would turn it into a graveyard.”[22]

A related image is that of the Valley of Stones Memorial[23], this time without a labyrinthine planimetry. Treblinka Memorial (1988) precedes the monument designed by Eisenman; the concentration camp site is covered in a metaphorical explosion by hundreds of stones with irregular edges, apparently ruins, with reference to the history of the site blown up by the locals that were looking for jewellery, after World War II. Specific items, at a smaller scale than the previously mentioned ones, evoke the order / disorder, the loss, by projecting the architectural spaciousness as a dialogue between horizontal and vertical plans, visually perceived.

In his construction of the Garden of Exile[24] in Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind clearly determines the repeatable matrix of the built area: the labyrinth is managed as a sequence of identical perspectives, of partially closed visual openings. clear of in the. 49 columns, filled with ground, support the suspended oak garden, with a widening area similar to the one further created by Eisenman, concealing the perception at ground level as an underground full of anguish reception. Complementary to Peter Zumthor’s approach, the labyrinth hides / suspends an intangible garden and brings into question a perception of the architecture in terms of retrieval and discovery.

The road ultimately leads to the truth, and as such, the architectural forms activate its implementation. The ideological determination derives from the old translations of the meanings between truth and beauty: splendor veri (Plato’s doctrine), splendor ordinis (Saint Augustine), splendor formae (Toma d’Aquino), what we like without concept (Kant), the sensitive embodiment of the idea (R. Bayer).

Not incidentally, Ilya Utkin and Alexander Brodsky[25], in the graphics Forum de Mille Veritatis (1987-1990), were discussing the immensity of the immeasurable, they associated spaciousness, time and immediate perception in an anguish of drifting among similar items – hence a substance multiplied by architecture, the pillars in a forum of the 1000 truths.

Guillermo del Toro described Pan’s labyrinth through the illusion of the loss and the continuous movement: „It is a place where you do sharp turns and you can have the illusion of being lost, but you are always doing a constant transit to an inevitable center. That’s the difference. A maze is full of dead ends, and a labyrinth may have the illusion of having a dead end, but it always continues. I can ascribe two concrete meanings of the labyrinth in the movie. One is the transit of the girl towards her own center, and towards her own, inside reality, which is real. ”[26]

The sensitivity present in El Laberinto del Fauno is essentially a reflection of the time, not of the space, as we abstract from the works of influence[27] (we refer in particular to Jorge Luis Borges, and the infinite temporal perception). Reference in this regard is another film produced by Guillermo del Toro – Cronos.

The interviews given by P. Eisenman and D. Libeskind reflect the organization of built structures as an implementation of the empathy, of the memory – a time-default phenomenon – hence the notion of the labyrinth: such a construction, in metaphor or reality, not actually handles space, but rather time. The labyrinth catches oneself in a special game of the memory, motivated by the interpretation of spaciousness in terms of time.

In Mitologii Subiective (Subjective Mithologies) Octavian Paler discussed the logics of the focal point – labyrinth, time, memory: „…first of all, the labyrinth talks, in a new way, […] about love and about the memory. To exit the twisting corridors, the unfaithful Theseus will remember the followed road, that is what Ariadna does in fact, she helps him to remember the maze … The world speaks that the Minotaur did not exist. The fact they could not find out the exit killed those that were pushed down there”[28]. In a final interpretation, the labyrinth refers to the inner human structure [29].

A particular emerging interpretation is connected to this infinity of the continuum and of the cycles. The labyrinthine construction, as the sum of the elements, manipulates the time invested in travelling through a given claustrophobic structure; it is a fantastic construction in this endless time and space – a couple, which at any moment may be defined by the other element without losing its meaning.

The adjustability , as a transition from one attitude to another[30], stands behind the particular temporal perception. The labyrinthine architecture speculates the stroboscopic mobility, the sensorial imaginary in terms of spatial loss, the uncomfortable tactility (the sharp edged stones in Treblinka), the aggressive dynamics (Alexander Brodsky, Ilya Utkin). Composition and decomposition become the specific mechanisms for the uncomfortable spaciousness, staking on the repetition of the construction elements.

„Hunc mundum Laberinthus denotat iste: Intrati largus, redeunti set nimis artus ...” – „The labyrinth is the allegory of the world – largely wide for those who enter it, but extremely tight for those who try to come back„says the inscription in the Church of San Savino, in Piacenza (the 10th century), quoted by Umberto Eco in Il Nome della Rosa as well.

[3] The action takes place in the Fascist Spain in 1944, succeeding the Civil War with five years (1936-1939).

[4] The over ground expression is a hybrid between the recognizable maze at Epidaurus and the Romantic vegetal structures. The underground planimetric projection marks the centre, the descending – ascending spindle, while the incised drawing, similar to petroglyphs, recalls one of the earliest depictions of prehistoric times. For reference are the Celtic drawings from the megalithic tomb on the island of Gavrinis, Larmor-Baden, France, dated c. 3500 B.C. Reproduced on the floor of the Gothic Cathedral of Chartres (Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, France, 1193 – 1250), the drawing is one frequently encountered in the middle ages – a typical circuit with 11 circles, divided into 4 quarters, more precisely a maze.

[6] „I think that Western cultures make a difference about inner and outer reality, with one having more weight than the other. I don’t. I come from an absolutely crazy upbringing. I had a f**ked up childhood. And I have found that [the inner] reality is as important as the one that I’m looking at right now. The other transit I can say is the transit that Spain goes through, from a princess that forgot who she was and where see came from, to a generation that will never know the name of the fascist. And, the other one is the Captain being dropped in his own historical labyrinth. Those are things I put in. But then, as I said, the labyrinth is something else. Each culture will ascribe a different weight to it.” – Guillermo del Toro, apud Murray, Rebecca – Guillermo del Toro Talks About „Pan’s Labyrinth”, http://movies.about.com/od
/panslabyrinth/a/pansgt122206.htm, accessed: 02.03.2012.

[21] A visitors’centre, where commemorative items link directly with the Jewish people and their suffered losses during the Holocaust. “It will be a memento for the aggressors’ country.”- Journalist Rosh, Lea, quoted works.

[26] „I think that Western cultures make a difference about inner and outer reality, with one having more weight than the other. I don’t. I come from an absolutely crazy upbringing. I had a f**ked up childhood. And I have found that [the inner] reality is as important as the one that I’m looking at right now. The other transit I can say is the transit that Spain goes through, from a princess that forgot who she was and where see came from, to a generation that will never know the name of the fascist. And, the other one is the Captain being dropped in his own historical labyrinth. Those are things I put in. But then, as I said, the labyrinth is something else. Each culture will ascribe a different weight to it.”- Guillermo del Toro, apud Murray, Rebecca – Guillermo del Toro Talks About „Pan’s Labyrinth”, http://movies.about.com/od/
panslabyrinth/a/pansgt122206.htm, accessed: 02.03.2012.

[27] „Some of the other works he drew on for inspiration include: Lewis Carroll „Alice” books, Jorge Luis Borges „Ficciones”, Arthur Machen „The Great God Pan and The White People”, Lord Dunsany „The Blessing of Pan”, Algernon Blackwood „Pan’s Garden” and Francisco Goya’s works. In 2004, del Toro said: << Pan is an original story. Some of my favourite writers (Borges, Blackwood, Machen, Dunsany) have explored the figure of the god Pan and the symbol of the labyrinth. These are things that I find very compelling and I am trying to mix them and play with them. >> ” – „Influences”, Pan’s Labyrinth,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Pan%27s_Labyrinth#Influences, accessed: 03.02.2012.